Sunday, April 20, 2014

I had a dream the other night. I dreamed I was bouldering. The place was a collage of various wilderness areas I have frequented over the years (you know how dreams are). It was a hot day; I could hear the locust, and the sun beat down on me through the otherwise still, dry air. I could smell the sage. It's funny how one remember smells. It was like being in Grand Junction again, hunting for fossils with my dad. Except now, I was very much alone--not lonely or distressed--just by myself. A large bird flew overhead and disappeared in the burning light marking the noon Colorado blue sky. I looked away to navigate the next pile of rock, placed there to make the way forward both cerebrally and physically demanding-- of that I was most certain. I could feel the sandstone roughening my hands and scraping my knees as I puzzled out the best path.

After climbing like this for what seemed a long time (probably only a second or two of real time), I came upon a cleft in the rocks. It appeared to be an entrance to a cave. Because it was large enough for me to fit through, I clambered my way in . From my original vantage point, it seemed quite dark beyond the opening; but the inner chamber I soon found myself was actually well lit. I looked up and all around, and everywhere was solid rock, yet the room was bright as day. Looking down I saw in the center of the stone cell, a pool of water. The liquid was pure and placid. It had all the appearance of a polished sheet of aquamarine glass that had been perfectly fitted within the hole in the rock floor. I crouched down for closer examination.

I looked at my reflection in the glassy water. It was a perfect rendering. I could see every mark, wrinkle, and blemish in my aging face with unusual--and I must say--depressing clarity and resolution. My life was recounted in the image peering up at me. I saw in that visage an entire history--not the history of Wells but my own. It began with the scar left on my cheek when I was four years old and tried to shave with my dad's razor. It progressed on from there. Each new degradation marring what once had been a baby face, bore witness to the reality of entropy and a long life of worries, fears, self-doubt, selfish choices, lost opportunities, and qualified successes. I shuddered as I gazed into the face of disappointment.

When I could no longer bear the truth, I reached down and scambled the water. The image didn't fragment or distort as one might predict, but transformed. Even though I had done violence to the watery mirror, the surface held perfectly calm. My hand was wet, and there were water stains on the walls of the rocky basin that hadn't been there before, but the pool itself remained unmoved. Only the image had changed.

I saw myself. I studied the new image intently, not believing what I saw. It was me. But the scars were gone. The worry and pain and anger and sadness and hopelessness had all vanished. The decrepit twilight of late autumn had suddenly turned to the dawn of early spring. The features of the old man shining back at me from the crystalline mirror had been smoothed and sculpted and shaped and polished into a paradox of youthful vigor. An inexhaustible vitality glistened in those peaceful blue eyes, and a fathomless joy gently turned up those tender lips in a smile. And although the room around me was encased in rock, a soft breeze tousled the hair about the face of that image. I knew it to be the spirit of freedom.

Monday, April 14, 2014

We have
already learned how mercy is the response that flows from the humility of one
poor in spirit. But we just saw how
mercy also requires sacrifice on our part.
This should illustrate for us how we cannot draw hard and fast lines
between the first four beatitudes nuanced as they tend to be in humility and
these last four nuanced by sacrifice.
Humility and sacrifice are inextricably tied together--hence my spinning
purple sphere illustration.

The best way
to illustrate the sacrifice of mercy is forgiveness. We all each and every day need to forgive
someone or be forgiven; forgiveness is almost as much a part of living as
breathing. We all must forgive because God
has forgiven us. To refuse to forgive others often is pure arrogance on our part because,
despite what we might say to the contrary, when we don’t forgive others we
really believe God was obligated to forgive us.

The other
necessary component of forgiveness is the sacrificial part that is mercy. One doesn’t really forgive anybody without
also being merciful towards them. And
such mercy means one will have to give up something or many things, whether it be
his time, his inconvenience, his reputation, his property, his money, his right
to be right, and his right to be vindicated.

People often
tell me I must forgive him or her but I don’t have to forget. This is the world’s wisdom, not God’s. It is not letting go of oneself to God, but
seeking one’s own benefit. It isn’t
being poor in spirit, or mourning with Christ, or being meek, or hungering
after righteousness. It is, in fact,
selfish-ambition and conceit and not the servant’s heart of humility and
sacrifice bound together in love. If we
stand in Christ we will forgive regardless of the cost to us, because God
forgives us the same way.

Relationships
can only be restored if there is forgiveness, but repentance is also
needed. I must forgive someone who has
wronged me without demanding any form of recompense, even their admission of
guilt and apology. (I understand this is a hard teaching. You must understand that what Christ has
called us to is all difficult because it is contrary to the world’s wisdom that
has been hard wired into us because of the fall.) We forgive others with no
strings attached; otherwise, we haven’t really forgiven them. But the relationship will only be restored if
the other person repents. You cannot
have a holy relationship with someone who fails to admit his or her
transgression. This is true in even
simple scenarios. For example, one would
be foolish to give an employee access to the till after she pilfered it without
remorse. You forgive by giving her another
duty if possible, but you don’t trust her with the money until she comes to
believe she was wrong to steal. On the
other hand, if she repents, then you give her her original job back, because
such mercy leads to a restored relationship.

If we are not
merciful in the way I’ve described, we will never receive mercy. The reason is simple. We won’t receive mercy because if we are
unwilling to be merciful, we don’t really believe we need it, or we believe we
were somehow owed it. Here we clearly
see how if we are not humble (poor in spirit) we also will not sacrifice. There is a more sinister reason for being
unmerciful; and that is in our heart of hearts we don’t really believe God has
forgiven us, or anybody, for that matter.

6) Blessed
(Happy) are those who are pure in heart because they will see God.

John tells
us in his first epistle,

See how great a love the Father has
given to you, so that we are called children of God, and so we are. For this reason, the world does not know us,
because it does not know Him. Beloved, we are now children of God, and it was
not yet revealed what we will be. We
know whenever it appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He
is. And everyone who has this hope in him
or her purifies him or herself, just as He is pure. (I John 3:1-3)

We learn
from this the ultimate end of Christ’s work in us is purity—holiness. We cannot stand in the kingdom of God without
being holy, because God is holy.

John also
teaches us we must be purifying ourselves.
And as we said at the beginning of this lesson we do this by remembering
who we are in Christ by doing what His spirit instructs us to do through the
grace of wisdom, strength, and forgiveness the spirit provides. All of which is to say faith is active not
passive.

Faith that
makes us holy is also sacrificial, just as Paul teaches us,

Therefore I exhort you, brothers and
sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive,
holy, and pleasing to God – which is your reasonable service. Do
not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of
your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God – what is
good and well-pleasing and perfect. (Rom. 12:1-2)[NET]

The
sacrifice begins with a willingness on our part to change how we think. One of the most crucial ways we do this is
laying out our motives before God. It is
easy—I mean effortless and slick—for us to think we are doing something good
for others, when in reality we are only doing it out of selfish-ambition. If our motives are wrong, we are not
pure—regardless of what we might be doing.
Paul also tells us if our thinking isn’t right (faulty motives) we will
not hear God’s will. Furthermore, I
cannot love God, which is my acceptable worship, unless I am a living
sacrifice. I cannot love God if I still
love myself more than God and therefore others.

It takes sacrifice on our part to become holy. This sacrifice begins and ends in loving God
with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and loving our neighbor as our
self. We should see in this that all we
have been talking about as the tension of mercy and justice is driven by and
towards ultimate fulfillment in the perfect tension of love and holiness that
defines the eternal state of God’s kingdom, because it is the nature of Christ. This tension of love and holiness is in fact
the law fulfilled in Christ, which is why I spent so much time at the beginning
of this lesson discussing it (Part 1). Putting it another way, because we stand in
Christ’s kingdom today and at the same time we also live in the fallen world,
our nature in Christ is the perfect tension of love and holiness that we
practice in the fallen world as the perfect tension of mercy and justice. And in so doing, we make ourselves pure.

We can
summarize this beatitude with a reading from the book of Hebrews:

Pursue peace with everyone, and
holiness, for without it no one will see the Lord. (Heb. 12:14)
[NET]

Crisp and
clean and no caffeine!

7) Blessed
(Happy) are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God.

We have spent
mucho time on this subject in previous lessons.
Suffice it to say our Lord Jesus the Christ, the son of God, always
pursued peace all the way to the cross and then beyond. Of course, Jesus does, because His kingdom is
perfect peace—perfect Shalom—because, contrary to popular belief, peace means
perfect justice, which is perfect holiness bound up in perfect love. And all of this is the righteousness that
comes from God. If we claim to be
followers of Christ, then we will be peacemakers and therefore sons of God. And as we have discussed previously, such
peacemaking demands sacrifice, even--dare I say it?--sacrifice unto death.

8) Blessed
(Happy) are those who have been persecuted on account of righteousness because
the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

If we stand
in the kingdom of God, which means we are Christ followers with all that
entails, we will be persecuted. The
perfect tense, “have been persecuted,” means we will be persecuted and that
persecution will leave its marks on us.
When we stand before God He will see those marks and know we have been
standing in Christ all along (I am speaking in human terms; of course, God
knows whether or not we stand in Christ).
The point is if we stand in Christ we will sacrifice ourselves to
persecution.

Jesus then expands
upon this last beatitude:

You are blessed (Happy) people
whenever liars revile you and persecute you and speak every evil against you on
account of Me. Rejoice and be full of
joy because your reward is great in the heavens; for in the same way they
persecuted the prophets who came before you. (Matt. 5:11,12)

Firstly,
Jesus is telling us something about what happiness really is. The world thinks it is having everything
going the way we want so we are perpetually on an emotional high—all smiles and
giggles. If that is so, why is it so
many famous people who got it all by the world’s standards are so broken in
their relationships and have to medicate themselves? No, happiness is a state of mind; it is an
inner peace that comes with finally knowing oneself because we love Christ. Dr.
Ratzinger, in response to those who say the beatitudes are really only sour
grapes, explains beautifully what I mean:

“In a
word, the true morality of Christianity is love. And love does admittedly run
counter to self-seeking—it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is
preciously the way in which Man comes to himself.”[1]

Secondly,
because true happiness is standing in Christ, we are indeed happy when we are
persecuted for righteousness sake. This
does not mean we can expect to be happy if we were persecuted because of our
own sake. If you are persecuted because
of your sin, you certainly cannot rejoice in that; no, in that case it is time
to repent.

Thirdly,
Jesus locates Himself as to what He means by “for righteousness sake”; He
teaches us the latter is synonymous with “for My sake”.

Fourthly,
Jesus said our reward is great in the heavens, not that heaven is our
reward. The beatitudes are not
prescriptions for how to get to heaven, but descriptions of one who is standing
in God’s kingdom today. The beatitudes
describe the nature of the heart of one standing in Christ in terms of that
person’s present status in the kingdom (e.g., I am poor in spirit, so I am in
the kingdom). Our status in God’s
kingdom doesn’t change, but there will be bonuses, as it were, when God
consummates His kingdom in the future[2].

Conclusion

The eight
beatitudes begin with our status being the kingdom of God and end with the same
status. The first beatitude strongly
emphasizes humility; the last beatitude strongly emphasizes sacrifice. To be in Christ is to have through Him His
nature of humility and sacrifice motivated by love. Jesus describes His nature we have in Him as
the beatitudes. Because Jesus came as a
servant, these beatitudes define a servant’s heart. I have vividly pictured this servant’s heart
as like a spinning, purple orb generated conceptually as a coin bearing
sacrifice on one side and humility on the other that has been spun and is kept
spinning by love. I also defined Christ’s
nature theologically as walking in the perfect tension of love and holiness. All that these are and all that result from
them—justice, holy relationships, peace, the fulfilled Law, and so on—is collectively the
kingdom of God centered in Christ; it is, in fact, the righteousness that comes
from God. Indeed, Christ fulfills the Law.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Unlike Moses
who only gave us the Law, Jesus came to be the Law for us and this because in
Christ we can know the Father[1]. Christ has perfectly fulfilled the Law so
that in Him we too can fulfill the law and this through holy love. John explains this nicely for us in his first
epistle:

Beloved, I am not writing a new
command to you, but the old commandment which you were having from the
beginning; the old commandment is the word that you heard. Again, I am writing
a new commandment to you, that is true in Jesus and in you, because the
darkness is passing away and the genuine light is already shining. The one who
claims to be in the light and hates his brother is still in the darkness. The one who loves his brother remains in the
light and no reason to sin is in him. But the one who hates his brother is in
the darkness and is walking in the darkness and does not see where he is going,
because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (I John 2:7-11)

Therefore,
Jesus is not burdening us with a new set of commandments, but freeing us to
fully apprehend the old commandments. He
frees us first by dying on the cross and being raised to eternal life in order
to put to death sin and death (what John means by darkness) that had for us
irrevocably broken our relationship with God, so that we can once again stand
with God in the relationship He created us for, by standing in the risen Christ
who is king, Lord, and Master—that is, by standing in the kingdom of God. And by so standing in Christ—a restored
relationship with God--we are free to fulfill the law through love and
establish, sustain, flourish, and forever enjoy righteous relationships with
each other. We are freed this way
because Jesus enlivens His holy love within us through the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit.

Standing in
Christ, which as I said is tantamount to standing in the kingdom of God, we are
truly happy (blessed). And this
happiness (blessing) prevails within us by faith in Christ to make it real to
us by doing what His spirit tells us through the grace of wisdom, strength, and
forgiveness His spirit provides. Putting
it another way, we are truly happy when we take on the nature of Christ by
faith. And this nature is the perfect
fusion of humility and sacrifice motivated by love. In short, it is the beatitudes.

I’m fond of
describing the kingdom nature, or servant’s heart, as a coin on which one side
is painted red and the other side is painted blue[2]. The colors symbolize sacrifice and humility,
respectively. Now imagine taking this
coin and spinning it. See how it becomes
a purple sphere. Yes, there it is; it is
the heart of Christ and therefore the heart of His servant-- one who follows
Christ—one who truly dwells with God in God’s kingdom—one who lives in Christ
by faith—one who is a Christian. But
what is the force the starts the coin spinning and then keeps it spinning? The force is love. The nature we have in Christ is the perfect
melding of humility and sacrifice motivated by love.

Jesus
describes eight beatitudes in the gospel according to Matthew. There are other beatitudes in the scriptures,
of course, but these concisely convey the servant’s heart. If you look carefully you can see how the
first four are nuanced toward humility, and the last four towards
sacrifice. We don’t want to draw solid
lines of division here, because one can easily discover many transpositions. But I find the nuances help us to appreciate fully
how these beatitudes describe the heart of Christ, and therefore the heart of
his disciples. We can loosely split the
eight beatitudes in the following way:

Humility: Be Poor in Spirit, Be One Who Mourns, Be Meek, and Be Hungry and Thirsty for Righteousness.

Sacrifice: Be Merciful, Be Pure in Heart, Be a Peacemaker, and Be Patient in Persecution

Let’s take
each beatitude one by one.

1) Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit
because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

To be poor
in Spirit is to be humble in the purest sense.
It is a complete and unqualified realization of our helplessness:

Certainly you do not want a
sacrifice, or else I would offer it;

you do not desire a burnt
sacrifice.

The
sacrifices God desires are a humble spirit –

O God, a humble and repentant
heart you will not reject. (Ps
51:16-17) [NET]

To be poor
in Spirit is a complete and ongoing repudiation of our misplaced trust that
constituted our rebellion. This is why
there is no incompatibility between Luke’s statement of this beatitude in a
material sense[3]
and Matthew’s in the spiritual sense.
The issue is trust; it is the lesson we learned from the encounter
between the rich man and Jesus. To walk
in God’s kingdom we give up any hope of finding security in the human heart or
its institutions. We must surrender
ourselves totally to Christ; there is no blessing (no happiness) outside of
this poverty of spirit. If we are to
enter the kingdom of God, we must trust God with a childlike trust:

And Jesus said, “Truly I say to you.
Unless you turn around and become like children, you will absolutely not enter
into the kingdom of Heaven!” (Matt. 18:3)

This holistic
trust is, of course, faith that is the perfect, unbroken triangle of belief,
trust, and obedience. In the first volume of his three volume series on Jesus
of Nazareth, Dr. Ratzinger captures the essence of people living by such faith:

“These are people who know that their poverty
also has an interior dimension; they are lovers who simply want to let God
bestow His gifts upon them and thereby live in harmony with God’s nature and
word.”[4]

To be poor
in spirit is humility, but this humility is not the kind mustered up in order
to get what we want by invoking pity in someone. Neither is this humility a
means some people use to exalt themselves over others, such as the Pharisee in
Jesus’ parable:

“Two men ascended into the Temple in order to
pray, one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee standing prayed about himself
these things: ‘God, I thank you because I am not even as the rest of the
people, swindlers, evil doers, adulterers, or even as this tax collector; I
fast twice a week; I tithe a tenth of everything I possess.” (Luke
18:10-12)

To be humble
as one poor in the spirit is to be stripped of all pretense of
self-sufficiency. It is the recognition
of one’s own powerlessness and lifelessness.
To be poor in spirit is to expose the lie that one is or ever could be a
god unto oneself. To be poor in spirit
is to finally grasp in the depth of humility one’s certain need of God’s
salvation. Indeed such humility wakes you up to the reality of you tumbling end
over end in a freefall into a bottomless abyss, where the ever increasing speed
of your descent blurs the features of the living passing beyond your reach. To be poor in spirit is the humility of the
tax collector:

The tax collector standing far away
(from the Pharisee), did not want to raise his eyes toward heaven, but beat his
chest saying, “God, forgive me the sinner!” (Luke 18:13)

To be poor
in spirit is Jesus telling Satan, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by the
word of God!” And “You will worship the Lord your God and will serve only Him!”

To be poor
in spirit is Jesus washing His disciples’ feet.
It is Jesus alone with the flames of the second death looming ever
nearer, praying to the Father, “Not my will, but your will be done.”

To be poor
in spirit is Jesus,

Who being in the form of God, did not
consider equality with God the thing to be grasped. But He emptied Himself by
taking the form of a servant, becoming in the likeness of humankind, and after
being found as a man in appearance, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient
until death, even death on the cross. (Phil. 2:6-8)

To be poor
in spirit is the humility of being the last of all and the servant of all. Yes, to be poor in the Spirit is to be the
greatest in the kingdom of God.

2) Blessed
(Happy) are those who mourn because they will be comforted.

Mourning in
the Greek is in the present or continuous form.
This means it should be always present in our minds. I don’t mean we must always walk around
hidden beneath hooded cloaks, reciting lamentations. No, to be in a constant state of mourning is
the humility of knowing the present world is not the way it should be—it is not
the right order of things—because of the rebellion of humankind against God. When someone asked G.K. Chesterton what he
thought was biggest cause of all the troubles in the world, he replied, “I am.”

When Jesus
arrived to raise Lazarus from the dead he was met by Martha and Mary in
separate occasions and mildly rebuked for not having come sooner to save
Lazarus. It is informative at this point
to note that Jesus did not get angry at them for their impertinence, even
though He knew he was about to bring Lazarus back to life and had tarried for
good reason. God always wants us to be
honest with Him—to come to Him as we are.

What we also learn from this story is Jesus saw how everyone was mourning at
the death of Lazarus, even now after four days in the grave. And even though Jesus knew everything would
be alright, the Bible tells us He wept.
Why? Because Jesus mourned with a
humility that said none of this should be.
Death was not what God intended for His image-bearers. The torment of loss and the anxiety of fear
that so grips our world are the sole result of our rebellion. Unless we grasp
this as a deep humility by rehearsing its truth every day, we will become
complacent. Unless we mourn in this way,
we will soon forget our own and sole culpability in the fall of God’s creation, and
return to trusting in ourselves and our human institutions. And in so doing, we will trivialize the
corruption and violence in the world; we will come to accept death as a useful
tool, and even a happy end; when in reality death is the source of all evil in
this world, because it separates us from God.

When we
embrace mourning in this way, we can be truly comforted, because the humility it
engenders turns us back to God for our life.
A good example of this for us is Peter after he denied knowing Jesus
three times. St. Paul teaches us,

For sadness as intended by God
produces a repentance that leads to salvation, leaving no regret, but worldly
sadness brings about death. (II Cor. 7:10) [NET]

The mourning
the fallen world knows is grief without hope.
It is mourning that either leads to suicide, as it did for Judas
Iscariot, or virtual suicide, where people kill themselves in vain pursuits and
dissipation. Otherwise, it leads to
contempt that slowly kills both the mourner and those around him or her.

But if we mourn from a depth of humility, we will turn back to God for comfort that, as John
Chrysostum observed, goes beyond just forgiveness but is an abundant
consolation[5].

3)Blessed (Happy) are the meek for they will
inherit the earth.

Dr. Ratzinger explains that the Greek
word praus means meek or gentle, and
is a translation in the OT of the Hebrew word, anawim, which refers to God’s poor; we see a connection, then,
between the first Beatitude and this, the third[6]. A meek person in the sense Jesus is meaning
here is the poster child of humility; he or she is a living example of what
means to be poor in spirit.

Meekness and
gentleness does not mean cowardly or spineless.
Meekness takes great courage because a meek person seeks to restore
justice with the weapons of God’s kingdom, which are mercy, forgiveness, and
sacrifice, and not the weapons of the world. James said,

Who is wise and understanding among
you? By his good conduct he should show his works done in the gentleness that
wisdom brings.
(James 3:13) [NET]

And such wisdom seems futile to a world that
believes power only resides in the sword.
Well, of course God’s wisdom would seem this way, because the world is
not poor in spirit, and it mourns with hopeless despair. The world subsists on its arrogance. But the meek in Christ are living abundantly
in humility.

A meek
person knows who he or she is in Christ.
Christ is perfect meekness. He
announced the arrival of His kingdom riding on a donkey, not with political
rancor or with the din of war drums and the rattle of armor and swords. He willingly
ushered in His kingdom by being nailed to a cross--bleeding, beaten, cursed and
spat upon--even though there was no sin in Him.
Christ cared deeply for God’s creation and lost humanity and He went
about saving it through the only means it could be saved: through the mercy of
God’s wisdom that is love, forgiveness, and sacrifice. So that at the height of the world’s contempt
and cocky self-vindication, Jesus still prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive
them, for they don’t know what they do.”
We who claim to be followers of Christ can be no less meek, because a
servant is not greater than his/her master; and a student is not greater than
his/her teacher.

Jesus tells
us that it is the meek who shall inherit the earth. The meek stand in the God’s
wisdom; they act to bring His justice through the gentle methods of His wisdom;
they seek God’s justice instead of their own, and endure the harsh rebuke—even
death--from the world that has a vested interest to remain in its
darkness. The meek in its sincere and
deep humility knows that the quick fix and seemly expedient measures proffered
by the world are nothing more than a thinly veiled conceit and
selfish-ambition. The meek person trusts
in the Lord even when it seems to be ineffective. And the Lord says it is such meek people who
will inherit the earth because they are walking now in sync with the world God
created to be, not the rogue world born out of rebellion. It is for the meek as the Psalmist says,

but those who rely on the Lord are the ones who will possess the land.

Evil men will soon disappear;

you will stare at the spot where they once were, but they will be gone.

But the oppressed will possess the land

and enjoy great prosperity. (Ps 37:3-11) [NET]

The fact the
Lord promises we shall inherit the earth, means God is interested in restoring
all creation, not just His image-bearers.
Our salvation is not only a private one, but a necessary part of God’s
whole redemptive plan. The humility of
the meek recognizes it is not about me but God reconciling the world to Himself,
to be the place where He dwells with His image-bearers in perfect justice,
bound together in love. And this kingdom is the seamless union of the physical
and spiritual realms.

4) Blessed
(Happy) are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because they will be
satisfied.

First of
all, the Greek words for hungering and thirsting are in present or continuous
forms, so Jesus means we must always be hungering and thirsting after
righteousness without ceasing.

Righteousness
was the term in the OT referring to fidelity to Torah—that is, to observe the
right path shown by God (i.e., the 10 Words).
I have already spent a lot of time at the beginning of this lesson
explaining how only in Christ is this righteousness fulfilled (See Part 1). We hunger and thirst for righteousness by faith
in Christ.

It is a
mistake to think of righteousness as only a right standing with God, even
though it is that. We first must have a
right standing with God, because only in that restored relationship can all the
rest of what righteousness is can be fulfilled.

Therefore
hungering and thirsting after righteousness is for each of us individually to
stand totally in Christ. But because the
kingdom is about restored relationships, each of us is seeking that others
would find their way to stand in Christ. This means we must model for them this
righteousness we have in Christ in all our relationships. Therefore to hunger and thirst after
righteousness is to seek Christ to transform us so that we love with a holy
love that leads to justice. This
requires a deep humility on our part because none of this righteousness is due
to anything we have done, but the outcome of what God is doing through Christ;
so we must not treat the world as if this isn’t true; to do so is not humility,
but a spiritualized arrogance and therefore unrighteous. To hunger and thirst after righteousness is
also, then, to seek the restoration of others in Christ by extending to them
the same mercy Christ has extended to us—to love others as Christ has loved us.

As we have
learned together, mercy is love acting in justice and for justice. We extend
mercy to the lost by lifting them out of the unjust state they find
themselves. And when they see this
justice in love they begin to understand their own sinfulness. An excellent example of this is the work the
Wheaton Bible Church has been doing in West Chicago. There are there apartment complexes of Latin
immigrants, and because of their impoverished condition there was a
rise in gang activity and a steep dropout rate among the children. People from Wheaton Church forsook their own
middle/upper middle class lifestyles and moved into these apartments and
ministered to the tenants there by tutoring children, providing job and
marriage counseling and medical services.
The result has been the children are going back to school, gang violence
has declined, and two services for the Latins have formed at Wheaton Bible Church
to accommodate the influx of new believers.
Those Christians at Wheaton hungered and thirsted after righteousness by
bringing justice (moving the wrong order to right order) by extending mercy to
the lost, with the result relationships are being restored along with the
fallout of justice—just as Jesus promised would happen when we continually
hunger and thirst after righteousness: we will be satisfied.

I would like
to add one more thing before moving on.
We should also see from the Wheaton example how John Chrysostom was
right in his perspective on this beatitude.
He said that hungering and thirsting for righteousness is turning away
from coveting wealth, property, and the accumulation of worldly prosperity[7]. Jesus will validate this later in the Sermon
on the Mount:

“But
seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all these things [the
things we need] will be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33)

My point is
the main reason we don’t extend mercy to the fallen world, and perhaps devise
whole theologies to justify our inaction, is because deep down we are
unwillingly to part with the possessions and wealth we believe to be our
security and comfort. This misplaced
trust is unrighteous; so our unwillingness to be merciful to those who don’t
deserve our mercy is not to hunger and to thirst after righteousness.

[1] I
believe this is what John means to communicate in the climax of the prolog of
his gospel account: Moses brought us the skeleton (the Law), but Jesus made it
alive by fitting it with the flesh of grace and truth because only in Him is the Father revealed to us (John 1:17,18).

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The second
temple Jews saw upholding Torah as the expression of wisdom and righteousness.
But the issue is what this wisdom must be based on. Matthew places the Sermon on the Mount near
the front of his gospel account because a primary objective of his is to show
Jesus as the Messiah—the personification of God’s wisdom—God with us.. All
of which is to say Jesus claims Himself to be the basis of wisdom. The Torah, then, is fulfilled in Christ.

Jesus ascended
the mount to proclaim this perfect wisdom to His disciples, which of course
includes you and me, as a clear nod to Moses ascending Mount Sinai to receive
the Law, or Elijah receiving instruction from God on the mountain. What we will hear from our Lord is
counter-intuitive and contradictory to conventional wisdom. Of course it is, because it is wisdom of the
Kingdom of God, not of the Kingdom of fallen humankind. Witherington sees Jesus’ wisdom statements
for the new relationship God has with His image-bearers in His kingdom (B.
Witherington, “Matthew” Smyth and
Helwys, Macon, GA, (2006).) I agree as long as we understand this
relationship as new in the sense of a restored relationship in Christ.

We will
discover as we listen to Jesus, He is fulfilling the essential Law, not all
that came to be the Torah. Many of the
Laws of the old covenant were necessary for keeping some order in Israel
coexisting in a violent, pagan world—that is, they were judicial laws. Such laws will vanish; others will be recast
into the essential Law, which is what I believe to be the Ten Words (Ten
Commandments). It is this essential law
Jesus ultimately fulfills. And we will
see what this means as the wisdom of Christ is unfolded before us in the Sermon
on the Mount (Matt. 5-7).

In verse 2 of
chapter 5 we see what seems to be a peculiar description we might take as
simply an archaic expression: “He opened
His mouth and taught them saying….”
But it isn’t. Matthew is
contrasting here wisdom Christ taught through miracles and through His silence
(e.g., before Pilate) with wisdom He is about speak to us. John Chrysostum in his homily on this passage
of Matthew further explains that Matthew connects Jesus’ acts of healing with
His verbal teaching to demonstrate God’s concern for both the spiritual and
physical aspects of His creation (Chrysostom, Homily XV (Matt. V. 1,2),
1.). God is restoring all of creation, not just
individuals.

Jesus now
lays out the eight so-called beatitudes. Let’s step back again and view the
magnificent forest and gradually hike our way in to examine these beatitudes in
detail.

The Sermon
on the Mount is the Kingdom ethos. It
isn’t a new set of commandments, but the fulfillment of the old set of
commandments—specifically, the Ten Words.
The Law is to God’s kingdom as the skeleton is to the body, in that the
Law provides the necessary infrastructure and shape for the Kingdom of God; the
Law describes what right order (justice) looks like and must be because God who
is holy created His kingdom for His good pleasure as a place to dwell with His
image-bearers—and God does not change. I
say this lest we might think the Law is a capricious thing, subject to change
by an act of congress.

The law is a
necessary but not sufficient foundation for the kingdom of God. If left alone, the skeleton remains nothing
except a sculpted inanimate collection of minerals. The skeleton only comes alive when covered
with flesh infused with living consciousness.
In the same way, the Law is fulfilled when it is animated by love. The law fulfilled by love is the necessary
and sufficient foundation of God’s kingdom, for only relationships built on
this foundation will be genuine (holy) and therefore thrive. And the kingdom of God is all about holy
relationships.

The right
order or infrastructure of the Kingdom as described by the Law is necessary for
holy relationships to form, flourish, and be forever sustained. The right order is necessary for true love to
flow between God and His image-bearers and therefore between the
image-bearers. In more profound terms,
the kingdom of God is the holy community created to share in the eternal
community of the Trinity. Because God is
relational, it was His good pleasure to create relational beings to become a
community with Him (Note: We must not make the mistake of suggesting God
had to create the cosmos in order to in some way complete Himself. God is totally autonomous; neither His
character nor his being is contingent on anything outside of Himself).
And all of us who stand together with God in His kingdom are blessed.

Let us
digress for a moment and think about this adjective, blessed. We shall see it is how Jesus introduces each
beatitude. Are we to understand blessed
as a method of entering His kingdom, or only some future reward awaiting those
who will enter His kingdom? No, even if in
their respective senses they are true, they don’t adequately define blessed as
it is used in the beatitudes. The Greek word makarios translated blessed also means happy. We who stand in God’s kingdom are certainly
blessed, because it is God’s sole accomplishment as an act of His inexpressible
love. But it is also true happiness for
us who stand in His kingdom. The fallen
world has been on an unending carrot chase for happiness, trying every
conceivable means to satisfy a hunger they fail to understand can only be sated
by the Kingdom relationships we were created for. We can and only will be happy in God’s
kingdom; this is Truth.

Blessed or
happy describes the inner wholeness we have as kingdom dwellers, both now and when
God consummates His kingdom. This blessed
(happy) condition is not mere abstraction, but even now should manifest itself
in the outward actions marking His kingdom dwellers. Putting it another way, this blessing is an
inner heart condition that expresses itself in holy relationships. What Jesus will unpack for us with the Sermon
on the Mount as His beatitudes is beautifully summarized in Proverbs 3:3-4:

Do not let truth and mercy leave you;
bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will find favor and good
understanding, in the sight of God and people. [NET]

True
blessing and the happiness we all seek is only found in the restored
relationships of God’s kingdom. And this
is not something we earn, or a reward, but as you shall see, a transformation
we have only in Christ.

There is a
paradox in this relationship of love with this infrastructure illustrated for
us by the Law. Unless the love is
flowing in righteous (holy) relationships—that is, relationships circumscribed
by the Law—the Law, itself, will be forsaken; it is only through love the Law
is ever truly obeyed. To use our
skeleton analogy, the skeleton is kept alive through the blood flowing through
it from the flesh it gives shape. Likewise,
the Law is vitalized by love. But even
as the living skeleton manufacturers the blood cells that will return to keep
the skeleton alive, the Law provides the boundaries of love. For it is as Paul said,

Owe nothing to anyone except the debt
to love each other; for the one loving others has fulfilled the Law. For the edicts, you shall not commit
adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and
if any other commandment, are summarized by this principle in this way: Love
your neighbor as yourself. Love does not
work out bad for a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law. (Rom. 13:8-10)

It is a
mistake, then, to view Christianity—walking in Christ’s kingdom—being a Christ
follower—from a legal perspective only.
This was the mistake Israel made.
They thought the Torah could be obeyed by holding to a standard of the
Law (e.g., the Sabbath requirements).
But this approach ultimately crippled or outright destroyed
relationships. This is a main theme of
Jesus’ pronouncement of seven woes upon the Scribes and Pharisees recorded in
Matthew 23:13-36. Let’s consider just a
few to hopefully drive the point home.

“Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites, because you shut out the Kingdom of Heaven from before the people;
for you are not entering the Kingdom nor are you letting those who are entering
to enter. Woe to you, Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites, because you go around the sea and the desert in order to
make a single convert, and whenever it happens, you make him twice a son of
hell than you.”

In the
fourth Woe Jesus explains how this happens.

“Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites, because you give a tenth of the mint and the dill and the cumin,
and forget the weightier things of the Law: the justice, the mercy, and the
faithfulness. You must do the latter
things and not forget the former things.
Blind guides, who strain out the gnat but who swallow the camel.”

Returning to
our analogy, then, if one attempts to keep the skeleton alive by depleting the
flesh—such as, say, limiting the diet to only those foods that will build
bones--one ends up killing both.
Likewise, if we try to keep the Law without love, or love without the
Law, we lose both. And this is exactly
the fate of our fallen world.

Jesus
teaches us the basis of the Law is love—that is, the law is fulfilled by love. What this looks like is what has come to be
called the beatitudes fleshed out in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus ascended the
mountain to reveal the Law—not a new law, but a fulfilled law. Indeed, it is the law God demanded from the
very beginning. Jesus reveals to us the
law of God’s kingdom, or as I called it earlier, the kingdom ethos. And every dweller of God’s kingdom will
perfectly conform to this Law because Christ perfectly conformed to it.

About Me

I was born and raised in Colorado and graduated in 1978 with a BA in chemistry and biology from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and then went on to attain a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I now work as a research chemist in the paper industry in the midwest and live with my beautiful wife and step-daughter.

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